Miuccia Prada, the anti-glam fashion queen

Miuccia Prada - the Left-leaning luggage heiress who turned a family business
into a multi-billion-dollar luxury brand - has little interest in fashion.
But that didn't stop leading lights of the industry turning out to honour
her last week in New York

Miuccia Prada turned an ailing luggage business into a global luxury brandPhoto: SPRINGS

By William Langley

7:00AM BST 13 May 2012

At last week’s epic New York fashion bash, Gwyneth Paltrow looked steely, Scarlett Johansson slinky, and everyone else merely relieved to have been invited. If anyone in the crowd at the Metropolitan Museum appeared faintly out of place it was the guest of honour, Miuccia Prada, the 63-year-old, anti-glam Italian fashion queen, whose life’s work the event was attempting to explain.

This was never going to be easy. Miuccia, the diminutive woman who inherited an ailing Milanese luggage firm, is today cited as one of the most distinctive voices in fashion, but it doesn’t make what she says any easier to understand. To some she is a subversive, to others a conservative, and to a few simply an oddity. She makes a big play of her youthful feminism, but lets her excitable husband, Patrizio Bertelli, run the business, and doesn’t seem to mind when he yells at her in restaurants.

She says, in the generally uncomfortable interviews she has given, that she doesn’t really like fashion, isn’t interested in how people dress, and wishes she had found a job doing something important. “When I design and wonder what the point is,” she once explained, “I think of someone having a bad time in their life. Maybe they are sad and they wake up and put on something I have made and it makes them feel just a bit better. So, in that sense, fashion is a little help in the life of a person. But only a little.”

Unsurprisingly, with this kind of mission statement, Prada’s phenomenal growth, from a single shop on the Via Fogazzaro into a hyper-chic, £2 billion-a-year global business, remains something of a puzzle, even to the best brains in the industry. Last week’s retrospective at the Met, co-hosted by Vogue editor Anna Wintour and heaving with fashion and celebrity types, tried to put Miuccia’s work into some sort of overdue context, by comparing her with another great Italian fashion iconoclast, Elsa Schiaparelli.

This worked to the extent that both women saw themselves as artists rather than designers, but Schiaparelli was flamboyant, vain and magnificently eccentric. Miuccia lives very differently, as fashion writer Dana Thomas, author of Deluxe, discovered on a visit to Milan: “You enter Prada through an anonymous, portal-like oak door – there is no name, no plaque, nothing – and are greeted by a security guard dressed in grey. Everything is grey: the security office, the cobblestone courtyard, the various factory-like buildings surrounding it, and many of the cars parked in it. The only thing that gives the place away is the guard’s uniform: it is not the typical, formless security garb, but tailored Prada with its stark – some would say neo-fascist – lines…”

Ouch! Miuccia has always rather dressed to the Left, embracing the Italian Communist Party as a university student, campaigning for women’s rights and fly-posting half of Milan with anti-war posters. Her well-connected parents were horrified, but by the time she finally decided to do the traditional thing by joining the family business, she had developed a streak of radicalism that did her no harm at all.

The House of Prada was as Lombardian bourgeois as it got. Founded in 1913 by Miuccia’s grandfather, Mario Prada, and his brother, Martino, it specialised in selling upmarket leather goods and steamship trunks to a limited clientele of adventurers, society ladies and distressed European aristocrats. The business struggled through the First World War and, at some time in the early Twenties, Martino bailed out. On Mario’s death in 1958 his daughter, Luisa, took over.

The company didn’t change much. Luisa stuck to selling handbags and raising the three children she had with her husband, Luigi, who ran his own business making golf-course mowers. Miuccia, the second-born, was brought up, she remembers, amid plenty of privilege but not much happiness.

“I had no fun,” she once huffed. “My family was too serious. They didn’t take care of me – it was a very serious and severe life – just boring, like totally neutral. I felt no emotion. I remember total flatness, and I didn’t have many friends. Also, when we were on holiday, we had to go to bed in the afternoon. My parents were truly severe.”

She went to Milan University, throwing herself headlong into the popular Leftist causes of the day, and making no attempt to disguise her disdain for the world of money and elegance she had come from. “I hated it,” she told Newsweek magazine last week: “I was a feminist in the Sixties, and can you imagine? The worst thing I could have done was to be in fashion. It was the most uncomfortable position.”

By the mid-Seventies, she’d had a rethink, formally joining the company and taking over the running of its main store. But Prada was still a small-time, essentially specialist business in desperate need of something to set it ablaze. At a Milan trade fair in 1977, Miuccia found just the thing – an exuberant, shaggy-haired, Tuscan handbag-maker called Patrizio Bertelli; within a year they were married.

The relationship is famed for its volcanic rows. “It’s exhausting having to work with him, but I admire and respect him,” Miuccia says. “It’s war in here every minute.”

While she set about creating what would quickly become Prada’s signature look – a minimalist, even raw style that rather unfairly became known as “ugly chic” – Patrizio concentrated on steering the firm into the big time. The focus switched to womenswear, followed by menswear, perfumes and a full range of accessories. Dozens of new stores were opened, and other companies – including the celebrated British firm Church’s shoes – were acquired. Today, the business operates in more than 40 countries and Forbes magazine estimates the couple’s wealth at $6.8 billion.

Not that the bafflement has abated. Last week’s gala gave the stars a chance to bathe in Miuccia’s peculiar brand of glamour, but didn’t do much to explain her strained relationship with the trade she’s in, or answer the big question of what she should really have done with her life.